Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu is proposing that the party disqualify anyone who has been sentenced to a prison term of three months or more from being a Likud candidate for a Knesset seat. The proposal is clearly aimed at Moshe Feiglin, who was sentenced to a prison term on trumped up charges of sedition for his illegal protests against the Rabin government. While I'm not a fan of Feiglin, I don't like the proposal at all.

There are plenty of reasonable ways to express one's opposition to the Netanyahu proposal, but in the latest sign that Arutz Sheva has veered from being a far right-wing but still journalistically respectable outlet, the site submits a bizarre argument that the proposal would disqualify Likud ex-Soviet dissidents like Natan Sharansky and Yuli Edelstein from running on the Likud list, since Sharansky and Edelstein both were imprisoned by the Soviet Union.

It would seem to be quite obvious that a proposal by an Israeli party banning those who served prison terms would only apply to those who served prison terms in Israel, and certainly not those who were imprisoned in a totalitarian regime like the Soviet Union, which for decades was an enemy of Israel.